Monitor.hr is a news web site in Croatia. I had never heard of them...but I know who they are now. I wrote a blog about "The top 100 search engines you probably never heard of" that I thought might be interesting to only a few people who care about search. I was at AltaVista in the early days and I still think search is cool. I know...I'm a nerd.
Well, I was checking my traffic logs and I see hundreds of hits from Monitor.hr and I am wondering who is that? I went to the site and it was impressive...but I couldn't understand a thing because it was in another language that I didn't understand. One of our readers left a comment saying it was Croatian. So, I check my traffic logs again, and now there are thousands of hits from Monitor.hr. And today there are thousands more.
The Internet never ceases to amaze me. Who would have thought that a nerdy article about unknown search engines would appeal to thousands of people in Croatia? I am happy that it did, but I never would have guessed.
Here is another example. A couple days ago I wrote a story about "Who wrote Linux 2.6.20? How large is the community?" The story was posted on Reddit by "Linuxer" and it generated over 5,000 page views originating from Reddit, along with another 6,000 from regular readers and visitors. That makes sense because the Reddit community is very technical, startup types, and programmers. But, still, I was surprised by the response.
Robert Scoble always told me to write a lot...about anything...because you never know who might be interested. That is how you build a community. Serendipity.
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Don,
You bring up an interesting point that I've been debating for a couple of days out of a personal experience. The idea of writing a lot about anything certainly works for building a community but it might hurt your end goal depending on what that is.
Let me explain: If the goal is to build a community with a large number of readers with no specific focus other than a broad category such as Technology, then that approach works wonders and the case is closed. But if in the other hand, your goal is to build a strong community and use it to drive your business, then, this can hurt your exposure.
When we first started blogging we were very focused on our articles and most of the content of our blog was all about very similar content. Our readers really liked it and we started to get more and more subscribers. At the same time this was a great marketing tool because when ever you would search for ANY keyword related to what we are doing, we would represent the most relevant search results for every search engine increasing our exposure to the world. As time went on, we started blogging about a slightly broader focus but still maintaining our identity and our community size tripled in a short amount of time. As this indicates, we were reaching a broader target (witch has an entire realm of benefits by itself but it’s not the point I’m trying to make) and our community was greatly benefiting from it; but at the same time our search results (although still very good) decreased in number and relevance because the overall content for our blog is not as concentrated as it used to be when we first started.
To give an end to this long comment (sorry about that) the point is that if the goal is strictly building a large community then blog away about anything you can think of; but if you want to use it as a powerful business driver then to much deviation from your core business can hinder that goal.
Cheers!
- Abe
Posted by: Abraham Sultan | March 01, 2007 at 11:46 AM